This course will analyze the executive powers wielded by the President of the United States. Throughout the course we will examine the history of social, political, and legal conflicts and compromise that has shaped the current scope and limits of presidential power. We will be discussing a variety of topics including executive orders, the president’s war powers, executive privilege, clemency, and the veto power.

Biological processes, the natural world, and the human condition have long inspired political thinkers, from Aristotle to the present. This course takes up important ethical and political questions of human freedom that derive from our human capacities and character. We will examine contemporary philosophical problems in four areas: bioethics; biotechnology, especially as related to reproductive technologies; discourses in human freedom and ecology; and the science of judgment and cognition. Texts will include selections from Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Saba Mahmood, Allen Buchanan, and William Connolly.

The College of the Environment Think Tank is inviting proposals for creative work on the theme of “Disaster” and the ways in which humans confront or survive disasters, to be shared with the public on Friday, March 2, 2018 in the Memorial Chapel as part of an event hosted by the COE Think Tank.

Below is the description of the themes we are working with. Proposals can be submitted for the creation of new work, or for existing work.

We are able to offer $200 honoraria. In addition to sharing the work at the March 2 event, we will ask you to talk about your project in 8-10 minute presentation with time for audience to respond and ask questions.

Proposals are due by Thursday, February 1, midnight.

Submit to: Katja Kolcio – Kkolcio@wesleyan.edu

Selection will be determined by Tuesday, February 6. Work must be completed by Monday, February 26 and the event will take place Friday, March 2, afternoon-evening.

Please include:

Your full name
Wesleyan University Email Address
Your Wesleyan University P.O Box # (for payment purposes only)
Your Wesleyan University ID # (for payment purposes only)
Your class year and major(s) if you have declared.
Are you an international student? (for payment purposes only)
A 300 word (maximum) description of the work. A sample of the work or other relevant work if such exists.
A description of the format and technical requirements (Performance? Exhibit? Video? Music? Etc?)

THEME: FROM DISRUPTIONS TO DISASTERS: A LENS ON THE HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIP

Since its inception, the Earth has had a violent history of disruption and disasters. Volcanic eruptions, transformations of the atmosphere, meteoritic collisions, mass extinctions, moving glaciers, plagues, disease, wars, politics and belief systems are but some of the perturbations, natural and otherwise, that disrupt the dynamic processes of the earth and all life that has lived on it. Natural and anthropogenic perturbations across a range of scales set the Earth, ecosystems and human communities onto different courses. While disruptions and disasters have been an integral part of the history and evolution of the planet, the relationship between humans and their environment continues to evolve as perturbations shift in frequency, magnitude and type. These perturbations arise from both non-anthropogenic and anthropogenic sources. But there is also a growing human-environment interaction that leads to disruptions and disasters at a variety of scales. While some of the anthropogenic factors depend upon technological advances (e.g., nuclear radiation) other factors are ancient (e.g., the use of fire to clear large areas for agricultural purposes, such as in Ukraine, Indonesia or South America).

Our current world offers a series of profound challenges to humanity. We are pushing our world towards a tipping point of climate change by our changes to the carbon cycle and use of fossil fuels. The social-political-ethnic-religious theater of rivalries and conflict intensifies as the environmental stage rotates. The biochemical machinery of humans and the biological world is now constantly challenged by exposure to a bewildering array of microbes, chemical, and other disturbance agents—to which, humans and other Earth inhabitants must continually adapt. In all of this, the human-environment relationship is cyclical. Both parts of the relationship manifest change in the other setting up an ever changing dynamic.

The 2017-2018 College of the Environment Think Tank will focus upon how humanity will confront and take measure of the human-environment relationship from diverse perspectives of biochemistry, ecology, socio-political-religious, somatics, art, and embodiment.

Thank you,

2017-18 Think Tank Members

Katja Kolcio, Chair and Professor of Dance
Ishita Mukerji, Professor of Integrative Science and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
Marguerite Nguyen, Assistant Professor of English and East Asian Studies
Eiko Otake, Menakka and Essel Bailey ’66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment
Helen Poulos, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environment Studies

The Allbritton Center’s Right Now Series, the Fries Center for Global Studies, and Wesleyan World Wednesdays present:

Development Officer at Urban Refugees (NY) Jeffrey Stein ’10, and Tun Khin, Rohingya human rights activist and voice for Rohingya people around the world (London) discuss how we got here and what the crisis looks like on the ground.

Please join us on Tuesday, Nov. 28 at noon in the Fries Center for Global Studies (Fisk201).

Puerto Rico was hit by the worst hurricane in over a century. There is currently a humanitarian crisis. Hurricane María left the entire island without electricity, water, and has taken the homes of thousands of Puerto Ricans. The country is completely devastated. The ecological damage is tremendous, and there is a public health crisis.

Currently:

there is no electricity or tap water

water is contaminated in the entire island (there is a strong need for water filters)

there are outbreaks of: leptospirosis, conjunctivitis, and gastrointestinal disorders

around 7,000 additional people are living in shelters post Maria

Danza Orgánica (DO), directed by Marsha Parrilla, is a dance theater company that uses movement to generate awareness around social justice concerns. It’s newest work, MELAZA explores de colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States of America. It has also served as a platform to generate awareness around Hurricane Maria, and raise funds towards grassroots organizations.

This program will bring together a panel of three scholars from three fields of inquiry to engage in conversation about the Haitian Revolution, (the only successful slave revolution in the history of the West) to assess its complex formations, meanings and gendered representations, as well as its possible implications for Black struggles today. Professors Alex Dupuy (Sociology, Wesleyan), Jeremy M. Glick (English, Hunter College) and Kaiama L. Glover (Africana Studies and French, Barnard) will gather to discuss their specific works, which focus explicitly on the Revolution and its aftermath. The timeliness and timelessness of this conversation could not be more exigent as we contemplate how to best envision new futures with “maximalist” potential when detrimental echoes of the past reverberate in our present.

Panelists:

Alex Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Wesleyan U. He is the author of Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (1989); Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (1997); The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (2007); Haiti: From Revolutionary Slaves to Powerless Citizens. Essays on the Politics and Economics of Underdevelopment (2014), and more than three dozen articles in professional journals and anthologies. He is particularly interested in issues of Caribbean political economy and social change. He is a well-known commentator on Haitian affairs.

Jeremy M. Glick is Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama at Hunter College, English Department. He is currently working on long-form essays on various topics including Frantz Fanon. His first book, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution, is the 2017 recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. It was recently reviewed by Slavoj Zizek in the L.A. Review of Books. His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/Coriolanus & Pan-Africanist Loss. He is also the Hunter College Chapter Chair of the PSC-CUNY Union.

Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, first editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (Yale French Studies 2016), and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelago Books 2014), Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (Archipelago Books 2016), and René Dépestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

You are invited to the Anthropology department’s panel discussion on Anthropology and #BlackLivesMatter on Tuesday, 11/1! It will be a fantastic event, featuring Black feminist anthropologists Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Bianca Williams, and Wesleyan’s very own Gina Athena Ulysse in a wide-ranging conversation about research, #blacklivesmatter, activism, and decolonizing anthropology.

Bianca C. Williams (Ethnic Studies and Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder) researches theories of race and gender within African diasporic communities, particularly the emotional aspects of being “Black” and a “woman” in the U.S. and Jamaica. She is at work finishing an ethnography, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and an edited volume titled, “’Do You Feel Me?’: Exploring Black American Gender and Sexuality through Feeling and Emotion,” co-authored with Jennifer A. Woodruff. Essays in Transforming Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology explore questions of race and gender in ethnographic research and pedagogical practices. She has also edited two collections of essays on #BlackLivesMatter, one for Cultural Anthropology and one for Savage Minds. She is a member of Black Lives Matter 5280 and the AAA Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence.

Dawn-Elissa Fischer (Africana Studies, San Francisco State University), also known as the “DEF Professor,” is completing two manuscripts: Blackness, Race and Gender Politics in Japanese Hiphop and Methods to Floss, Theories to Flow: Hiphop Research, Aesthetics and Activism. Her work has been published in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Transforming Anthropology, FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies and The Western Journal of Black Studies. Dr. Fischer has co-produced a short film, Nihon Style, with Bianca White, which documents an annual Hiphop festival and its related organizations in Japan. Dr. Fischer has participated with numerous international social justice creative arts endeavors, including, but not limited to Hiphop as a transnational social movement. She co-directs the BAHHRS (the Bay Area Hip Hop Research and Scholarship) project with Dave “Davey D” Cook and she is a founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive as well as a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention.

Gina Athena Ulysse (Anthropology, Wesleyan University). In 2015, Prof. U received Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the Haitian Studies Association award for Excellence in Scholarship. A public anthropologist and performance artist, Ulysse’s research integrates her interests in Black diasporic conditions, ethnography, pedadogy, performance and representation. More specifically, her interdisciplinary work explores the continuous impact of history on agency and possibilities of social justice in the present. Her publications include Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (2015) and Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importing, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (2007), and Because When God is too Busy:Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2016) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her performance projects include VooDooDoll, What if Haiti Were a Woman? and Contemplating Absences and Distances. Ulysse guest edited “Caribbean Rasanblaj” (2015) a double issue of e-misférica journal and “Pawol Fanm sou Douz Janvye” (2011) in Meridians journal. An intermittent blogger, she often muses on AfricaIsACountry, Huffington Post, Ms Blog and Tikkun Daily.

Net neutrality is a central issue of freedom of speech and access on the Internet. If you’ve ever streamed movies, TV, or sports games on your computer, then net neutrality is something important to you!

In February 2015, the FCC voted to uphold Net Neutrality and forbade Internet providers from charging some users to access “fast lanes” while forcing others into “slow lanes.” This was the single-most important issue surrounding the Internet, and the most important decision made by the FCC about the Internet, of the past decade.

Learn more about what net neutrality means in this Q&A with Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web), and by attending this panel with some fascinating guest speakers: